What Is Writing Not?
In the essay “Contemporary Prose Styles” from her collection of essays on the life of a writer, Dillard engages a popular metaphor for the purpose of negation. She assertively rejects a commonplace symbol for what writing is supposed to be and instead offers an alternative perspective:
“Fine writing is not a mirror, not a window, not a document, not a surgical tool. It is an artifact and an achievement; it is at once an exploratory craft and the planet it attains”
Seeing in the Dark
“Seeing” is the most anthologized essay in Dillard’s most famous work, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It is about the process of transforming merely looking into seeing, merely observing into apprehending. A difficult task to master in the best of times, but seemingly impossible under the worst of conditions: nightfall. But then that’s the whole point; seeing is not just about vision and because human nature assumes it is, we all remain phobic to one degree or another:
“After thousands of years, we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms cross over our chests.”
Do Humans Really Value the Lives of Others?
April 30, 1991 was the date of a catastrophic event which some alive that day have never forgotten and many never even heard about. On that date, the rushing waters of a power tsunami swept through Bangladesh and took with it the lives of 138,00 people. Dillard brings this extraordinary figure up as the topic of conversation that night by suggesting that it was hardly even possible to imagine that many people drowning in in the same place around the same time on the same day. It is a conception which her daughter grasps quite easily, boiling down all that existence snuffed out in an instant to an image the author finds disturbing: “Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.” This stimulates Dillard’s rational and logical mind to ponder over what her daughter’s innocent response says about how much every life is actually valued:
“Does an individual’s value weaken with the square of distance, like the force of gravity?”
Does God Really Value the Lives of Humans?
Julie Norwich is a young girl who survived the crash of the small plane in she was flying with her life intact, but her face dislodged. Severe burns disfigured her for life. Norwich becomes for the author a symbol of the God who is a brute and a traitor to His creations.
“Julie Norwich is salted with fire. She is preserved like a salted fillet from all evil, baptized at birth into time and now into eternity, in the bladelike arms of God.”
“We live on dead people’s heads.”
This metaphor may well rank somewhere among the top five in the entire canon of Dillard’s work. It is, quite simply, a work of literary genius. In just six simple words—five of which contain only one syllable—the author illuminates the progress of civilization, industry and an unexpectedly small amount of real estate near a large enough supply of fresh water to keep everybody alive. The course of human development is literally built upon the bones of those who came before. There is even a name for the study of this historical fact: archaeology.
